Real-time Data

Real-time data is data that becomes visible in reports seconds after the event occurs, without waiting for a scheduled processing batch.

The real-time path is usually separate from the reporting path: events go straight to a fast store and are counted there, while the main pipeline is still removing bots, deduplicating, waiting for late arrivals and attaching sessions to users. As a result the live number is unprocessed, and its gap with tomorrow's report is not an error; the processed report is the system of record. The right use is time-sensitive decisions: confirming that a publication or campaign is live, watching the effect of a push notification, and spotting an outage. It is not a basis for reporting or period comparison.